<- BACK

Differences that led to our firing Edward Einhorn

If I had known about this article in the Village Voice ("Disobeying the Foreman") in time, I never would have hired Edward Einhorn. The VOICE article makes clear Einhorn's disrespect for the work of other playwrights. Tragically for TAM LIN, I didn't find out about it until the last week of rehearsals. When I mentioned it to Einhorn, he said that Richard Foreman was kidding around. By that time I no longer accepted Einhorn's word for anything and so I emailed Foreman and asked him about the incident. He said that he asked Einhorn not to direct his plays anymore because Einhorn "always made a mess of the plays" But by then it was too late, Einhorn had already made a mess of TAM LIN.

Edward suggested that we use black lights for the magic scenes of the show, and I thought that was a good idea. But then he began talking about projecting slides onto scrims to represent the realm of the Queen of the Faeries. Jonathan flat out didn't want to do it because of the hassle and expense of the slides and projector. It was also more tech than was necessary to tell the story. We went around and around and I convinced Jonathan to give it a chance. I should have listened to Jonathan.

So we sucked up the expense of photography for the slides and the scrim, assuming that Edward Einhorn knew what he was doing, since, as he was constantly reminding us, he had so very much experience in the theatre.

Serious problems with the scrim/projections and set design became apparent during tech rehearsal.

• Edward had instructed the set designer to purchase a scrim, which he planned to use for virtually every scene in which the faeries were in, which is almost half the play. He also planned to have black lights on for every scene the faeries were in. It turned out that the black lights lit up the white scrim, causing it to glow, and making it opaque. The point of a scrim is to allow it to be transparent sometimes and opaque others. If we used the black lights, the scrim had to go. And since the black lights were essential to the pivotal magic transformation scene in the play, the black lights had to stay, which meant the scrim was completely useless and had to go.
• A rose bush is very important to the story of TAM LIN. The set designer gave us something that looked like a big green wave, made out of wood, with a bunch of points. Not only were the wooden points dangerous, but actors kept catching their long flowing costumes on the points, And it would not work as a rose bush at all, with roses shoved down into the crevices in-between the waves.
• The set design included a table and chairs, which were only used in a couple of scenes, but which took up a considerable amount of stage space. The table was worse than useless, it was an obstacle to the stage fights.

When the article in the New York Times ("Exit, Pursued by a Lawyer") came out in January, Einhorn sent an email to the TAM LIN 2004 cast members - one of whom forwarded the email to me. One of the things that Einhorn said was:

"And if Nancy truly felt my staging was "incompetent," I doubt she would have then kept it in full."

He was complaining because the article said "Did the playwright, Nancy McClernan, insist that the director's staging was incompetent?" I never used the word "incompetent" when talking to Jesse Green about the show, but I guess he must have picked up on my exasperation. In any case, since we removed the scrim, replaced the dangerous wooden "rosebush" and removed the table, you could hardly say I kept his staging in full. Of course we only had one night before opening in which to make changes, and so we couldn't do all that we wanted to in the amount of time we had. But we certainly made changes throughout the production's brief run. We did the best we could to clean up the mess that Einhorn left us.

I had come to recognize just how obtuse and insensitive Einhorn was to my concerns before the fateful tech night. The trouble was brewing well before then:

Einhorn also made a big deal of his staging of the big magic scene in TAM LIN, as if he did something really amazing and original. But other than the use of black lights (the use of which, even Edward Einhorn couldn't claim was his personal intellectual property) most of the transformation of Tam Lin into a snake, a lion and a burning rod of iron was similar in many ways to the previous year's extremely low-budget production, as I testified on the witness stand:

DIRECT EXAMINATION BY MR. BUTTERFIELD::

Now, we have heard a lot of testimony about a shape-shifting scene; do you have that scene in the play in mind?
A.  Yes.
Q.  Was that scene in the production in 2003 --
A.  Yes.
Q.  -- of Tam Lin?
Can you briefly summarize that scene for the Court?
A.  Yes.
It's a magical scene so it is difficult to do, especially off-off-Broadway.
It is a transformation scene, the queen of fairies is testing Janet, she has to pass
these tests in order to win Tam Lin away.  I don't know why, I guess that's how it works in
fairly land. So, the queen of fairies transforms Tam Lin while Janet is supposed to hang on
to him, into a snake, a lion and an iron rod.
Q.  How did you portray those changes in the 2003 production?
A.  Well, we had a curtain in the back, a black curtain, and Tam Lin and Janet
were standing in front of the curtain and what we did was we had a puppet,
it was a snake puppet.  It was basically two pieces, there was a snake head on one hand
and a snake tail on the other.  So, we had something behind the curtain with this on
their hands and when the transition, the first transition was a snake, so a person was
behind the curtain and they reached around and they hugged the Janet
character while the guy playing Tam Lin sort of went behind. Then, an actor had a lion mask
on, so Janet is facing the audience and there is the snake puppet.  And then, when the
transition happens, she turns around, the snake puppet goes away behind the curtain,
an actor with a lion mask is now seen with Janet's back to the audience and the lion's face
facing the audience.
Q.  What happens next?
A.  So, the next transition is an iron rod, and so we had a rod
and somebody handed it through the curtain. So, the guy playing Tam Lin with the mask
slides down behind Janet so you can't see him and somebody hands Janet a rod, and then
she brandishes it and she is supposed to stand there holding it for a while as a test,
and then she throws it into the well.
Q.  This is all what happened in '03?
A.  Yes, it is.
Q.  Can you please describe how that scene was portrayed in the '04 production?
A.  Well, there are many similarities.  There was the black curtain in the back.
The snake was different.  We had this, like I said, sort of a puppet thing.
The snake in the 2004 version was a painting on Tam Lin's cape but he -- sort of the
same thing where Janet was back -- well, she was holding him from the side, actually,
with the snake and then he, somebody put a lion mask on him and then he turned around
and then she was holding him with the lion mask on.  And then, again, somebody passed
her an iron rod and she brandished the iron rod and threw it into the well.

The 2003 production was directed by Synge Maher, and I actually think she is a very good director. The only reason I didn't use her again was because I felt that stage magic isn't her area of interest, and wanted someone with more experience along those lines. And so the primary reason that we even used Edward Einhorn was because I thought he had experience with this kind of stage tech work. What he ended up giving us was nothing special. The only reason it was better than the 2003 production was because of the black lights.